Most teams practicing SAFe® work with Jira. The problem: the PI Planning features Atlassian offers – specifically Jira Plans (formerly Advanced Roadmaps) – are only included in Jira Premium. For a 100-person development team, that quickly adds up to over $10,000 in additional costs per year, just so 8 people can plan.
This guide shows how teams can run PI Planning on Jira Standard – completely, without compromising on planning quality.
Quick heads-up: Jira Standard lets you export any backlog as a CSV file. That CSV contains everything you need for PI Planning – story points, components, teams, sprints. The trick is knowing how to use it.
What you actually need for PI Planning
Before we get technical: what does PI Planning really involve? At its core, it's about planning which team delivers which features in which sprint for a Program Increment (PI) – typically 8–12 weeks. The result is a Program Board that makes dependencies visible and serves as a shared baseline for all teams.
For that you need:
- Your feature backlog (with priority and estimates)
- An overview of team capacity per sprint
- A tool that assigns features to teams and sprints, and visualizes dependencies
Points 1 and 2 you already have in Jira Standard. Point 3 is what drives most teams to either upgrade to Jira Premium or fall back to Excel.
Step by step: from Jira Standard to a PI roadmap
Export your backlog from Jira as CSV
In Jira Standard: open your board → Backlog → "Export" in the top right → "Export as CSV". Select all relevant fields: Summary, Issue Type, Story Points, Component, Sprint, Assignee, Priority. This export has everything you need.
Define capacity per team and sprint
Before the planning session, determine how many story points each team can realistically deliver per sprint – after accounting for leave, holidays, and team overhead. A good rule of thumb: plan 70–75% of theoretical capacity for new features.
Distribute stories across teams and sprints
Sort your backlog by priority (e.g. WSJF or Business Value). ROADagile then distributes the stories across your teams' sprints automatically, based on capacity – dependencies are taken into account and shown as connecting lines in the roadmap.
Review and project the roadmap
ROADagile shows the finished PI roadmap with timeline, statistics and hierarchy – ready for the projector at your PI ceremony. A cleanly presented plan creates shared understanding and gives the increment a visible foundation. (Export and session saving are coming soon.)
The most common mistakes with DIY solutions
Excel as a Program Board
Excel works – until the first change. As soon as a team says in the ceremony "we can't fit that into Sprint 3", the manual updating begins. With 5 teams and 20 features, this is error-prone and eats up valuable ceremony time.
Dependencies get missed
The most common planning mistake: Team A plans a feature for Sprint 2 that depends on a component Team B won't deliver until Sprint 3. In Excel or Miro, such dependencies often only become visible in the review – too late to re-plan.
The session isn't reproducible
After the ceremony, the plan often only exists in screenshots or a saved Excel file. At the next PI Planning, you start from scratch instead of building on the previous increment.
What Jira Advanced Roadmaps actually delivers – and what it doesn't
To be fair: Jira Plans has real strengths, particularly for portfolio-level capacity planning and aligning multiple ARTs. For teams working purely within Jira Cloud and with the budget to match, it's a solid option.
Three scenarios where Advanced Roadmaps is not the answer:
- Jira Data Center / On-Premise: Advanced Roadmaps is a cloud-only feature. Teams behind firewalls or in regulated industries have no option.
- Small ARTs with 2–4 teams: The price difference between Standard and Premium only justifies itself above a certain team size.
- Data privacy requirements: Planning data – Jira project names, story points, feature descriptions – resides on Atlassian's servers. For some organizations, this is a deal-breaker.
Conclusion
PI Planning without Jira Advanced Roadmaps isn't a compromise – for many teams, it's the more pragmatic choice. Jira Standard delivers all the data you need. What's missing is a tool that turns the CSV export into a clean PI roadmap, without data sharing and without setup overhead.
That's exactly what we built with ROADagile: CSV from Jira, upload, plan – all in the browser, zero data on our servers.
Be there at launch
ROADagile turns your Jira CSV into a finished PI roadmap in 5 minutes – all in the browser. Join the mailing list and be among the first to know when it goes live.
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